We propose a user centric wireless testbed that interprets the user as a key component of the network control and operation.
The testbed offers programmable entities in both core and access network edges, enabling researchers to implement cognitive and cooperative decision mechanisms for enhancing the end-to-end service experience. Moreover, a basic implementation of the knowledge plane is provided as a distributed repository on individual network elements, where end user devices can also act data providers. The testbed may serve the need for an experimental research environment for developing and testing such semantic and programmable network approaches that covers both wired and wireless domains.
The proposed testbed has already been utilized for research in various scenarios, where we experiment the effect of considering user experience information as an indicator for network condition and taking smart actions accordingly. Ranging from attack and congestion mitigation in wireless local area networks to real-time inter-operator load balancing, we briefly share our experiences and results from those experiments.